Next month, more than 500 chess players from 39 countries will arrive at the Planet Hollywood Casino in Las Vegas to compete in a tournament with the biggest prize fund in chess history — $1 million. And despite all of the players paying at least $1,000 each in entry fees, the tournament organizers will almost certainly lose hundreds of thousands of dollars.

But they expected that.

The tournament, called Millionaire Chess, is intended to be the first step in a multiyear plan to organize and run tournaments with big prize funds, said Amy Lee, 43, an entrepreneur from Vancouver, Canada, who is financing the event.

Her business partner, Maurice Ashley, 48, the only African-American chess grandmaster, was the driving force behind the HB Global Challenge tournament in Minneapolis in 2005. That tournament had $500,000 in prizes — the previous record for a chess tournament — and was financed by a retired businessman named Al Blowers, who was trying to promote his own charitable chess foundation. The tournament lost a couple hundred thousand dollars and, soon after, the foundation folded.

The partners expect to lose up to five times that — $1 million — in the Las Vegas tournament.

“If we only lose $200,000,” Mr. Ashley said, “we’ll be dancing in the streets.”

The idea behind Millionaire Chess is to raise the profile of the game. “It has a 1,500-year history,” Ms. Lee said, “and it has not been recognized at the level that I believe it should be.”

Millionaire Chess will offer more than just big prizes. There will be a free show in the casino one night during the tournament, complimentary food and drinks, and limousine service for the top players. There will be video cameras and Internet links so that people around the hotel, and worldwide, can watch many of the games.

“In order to bring sponsors in, you have to make chess exciting, you have to make it fun,” Ms. Lee said.

Ms. Lee said that she knew that turning Millionaire Chess into a moneymaking venture would be difficult, but added that she was used to taking business risks. On her website, she recounts a classic rags-to-riches immigrant tale: Chinese background, born in Vietnam in 1970, fled the country as a war refugee, settled in Canada, went to work in a restaurant at 12 after her father died, married and divorced young, single mother of three, started a small real estate business, founded a discount store called Amy’s Loonie-Toonie (named for the Canadian one dollar and two dollar coins), started a restaurant, and built luxury homes.

She said that three times during her many ventures, she took out so many loans, sometimes by maxing out her credit cards, that she had a negative net worth. But she said she came through and retired at 38.

Ms. Lee and Mr. Ashley met in 2009 at a personal development program at a resort in the Adirondacks. Part of the program was a chess class run by Mr. Ashley. Ms. Lee did not know how to play, but she watched him play blindfold chess — an exercise in which Mr. Ashley faces away from the board and calls out his moves and has the moves of his opponent told to him. “I was fascinated,” she recalled.

They began talking and every year Ms. Lee went back and their acquaintance was renewed. Last year, during one of their late-night conversations, Mr. Ashley explained how frustrated he had been about the state of chess in the United States.

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Maurice Ashley, 48, the only African-American chess grandmaster, is no stranger to organizing big-money tournaments.CreditJames Estrin/The New York Times

“When I became a grandmaster in 1999, there seemed to be nowhere to go with it,” he said.

Mr. Ashley described some of the projects and ideas he had tried and also wanted to do. The next day, he said, Ms. Lee came back with “about 50 questions on an Excel spreadsheet.”

Millionaire Chess was born.

Ms. Lee said that she has never seen a chess tournament or run a big event, but she believed that was not important. “I consider this as a business,” she said.

She said that she saw Millionaire Chess as a three- to five-year investment, which would include attracting corporate sponsorships and holding tournaments in other cities. “We are looking at an Easter option right now,” she said. She hopes to break even by next year.

The partnership has worked thus far because each leaves the other to make decisions in his or her area of expertise.

“If it is a chess problem, it goes to Maurice,” Ms. Lee said. “If it is not a chess issue, it comes to me.”

The site and dates for the tournament were announced in December, but chess players were slow to respond. “What we heard when we started is, ‘No way that people would pay $1,000 for a tournament, people are too cheap,’ ” Mr. Ashley said.

“I thought we were going to get 300 people,” said Ms. Lee, who had set a March 31 deadline to decide whether to proceed.

By the deadline, 76 players had paid. “I had to make a decision to go or not go,” she said.

As a second deadline approached — July 31, when the entry fee would rise to $1,500 from $1,000 — they still only had 120 entries. But in the last 36 hours before the deadline, 400 more entries poured in.

“We are thrilled with what we have right now,” said Mr. Ashley.

One of those late entries was Justin Easterday, 27, a San Francisco Bay Area chess coach and tournament director. He is one of the lower-ranked players in the competition. He said that $1,000 was a lot of money for him, but he decided to play because “I just think that it will be a cool event to be a part of.”

Ashik Uzzaman, 38, a software engineer who is also from California, was one of the first 76 entries, along with his son, Ahyan Zaman, 7. It will be a family vacation for them, along with Mr. Uzzaman’s wife, Sushmita, and their daughter, who is 3.

“This is our passion and our hobby,” Mr. Uzzaman said. But there was another reason that he wanted to play, and particularly for his son to participate. He said that people who were willing to spend so much money on the entry fees were really committed to the game and that would create a special atmosphere that was different from other tournaments.

That is exactly Mr. Ashley’s goal. “I hope this will catapult chess to the next level,” he said.

Ms. Lee said that Millionaire Chess “may be crazy to a lot of people, but someone has to be the forward-thinking person.”

Correction:

An article on Monday about a chess tournament in Las Vegas that will offer $1 million in prizes misstated the meaning of the name of a store founded by Amy Lee, who is financing the event. The store, Amy’s Loonie-Toonie, was named for two Canadian coins, the one dollar “loonie,” which has a loon on one side, and, in a portmanteau of the words two and loonie, the nickname for the two-dollar coin, the “toonie.” It was not named for the two sides of the one-dollar coin.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A12 of the New York edition with the headline: Millionaire Chess to Hit Las Vegas, in Gambit to Raise Game’s Profile With Big Prizes. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe